In Their Own Words: Are People Becoming More Religious?

Everyone is worried about increased religiosity, maybe because they associate it with extremism. Let’s point out the obvious fact that if a person becomes more religious that does not mean he becomes a fanatic. There are plenty of very devout people in the world, in all different religions, who don’t do anything weird or violent. They just live good lives and are generally very pleasant to talk to. Pretty much everyone—outside scholars as well as locals—agree that people in Central Asia in general, and Kyrgyzstan in particular, are becoming more religious. The man in this post, who is also the man from the last post, disagrees.

We should get one thing straight. People are not becoming more religious right now. They’re just devoting themselves more to religious rituals. I’m talking about saying the prayers and things like that. But becoming more religious—no. Here’s a simple example from real life. We talked about why people get married. That question can only be answered by religion and no one else, because people don’t know, really, why they need to get married. There are a lot of divorces. We went to the universities and asked students the question of why they are supposed to get married. Some said that you get to an age where you get married. Others said they get married so their wife will do the washing and cooking. Others said it was to have children. Others just said that you just needed to get married. There’s no education given—people get married for those reasons and bring children into the world for the same reasons. People aren’t becoming more religious, because they still don’t know the purpose of getting married or having children and things like that.

So why are people devoting themselves more to religious rituals?

People always have needs. If you don’t eat for a day, then the next day you want to eat. Even if you go half a day, around lunchtime we start to search for the food. A person is made up of two parts—a physical and a spiritual. During Soviet times we didn’t feed the spiritual portion. We had the ideology of the government, the communist party. We filled our spirit with that ideology. When the Union fell apart, we were deprived of that spiritual food. So our spirit started to search for something that would satisfy its needs. So there are a lot of cases where people join sects and other things, because the spirit has to be fed.

If people aren’t really becoming more religious, why are we seeing more extremist groups?

Who joins [extremist groups]? As a rule, it’s ignorant people. They join this religion [Islam] because of their spiritual needs, but they fall prey to those groups’ agitations because of their ignorance. If we would have lessons about religion in the schools and universities—not lessons about Islam, but just lessons about what religion is, what different religions say about themselves, is religion right or wrong, what extremism is, then they wouldn’t join. It’s all because of religious ignorance.